


Words for snow and sorrow

by foughtyen



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Canon-Typical Racism, Canonical Fantasy Colonialism, Cultural Assimilation, Cultural Reclamation, Dedue's Got Trauma, Domesticity, Established Relationship, F!Ashe, F/M, Internalized racism, Kissing, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Trans Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert, Trans Female Character, Wedding Planning, language learning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-29
Updated: 2020-09-29
Packaged: 2021-03-07 19:55:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26703325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foughtyen/pseuds/foughtyen
Summary: Ashe tries to learn some words in Duscur, but Dedue's reaction is not what she expected. To explain why, he tells one story about a dress, and then another.- or -Dedue reflects on the self-erasure needed to survive a new life in a new land.
Relationships: Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert & Dedue Molinaro, Ashe Duran | Ashe Ubert/Dedue Molinaro, Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd & Dedue Molinaro
Comments: 3
Kudos: 25





	Words for snow and sorrow

**Author's Note:**

> This began as an attempt to find something more than solicitous deference in Dedue's resignation/placidity towards interethnic relations. Pilipinx (and less deliberately, Indigenous) readers may recognize some things. Expect touches on topics of colonization, (diaspora, and) displacement.
> 
> Thanks to EW and VH for beta.

_Garreg Mach, first floor officers quarters (formerly student dorms)_

Dedue watches with an alchemist’s intent as tendrils of steam fog like breath against the underside of the teaspoon. The heaping pile of honey it ferries to the hot water is a golden glacier oozing into a boiling sea. When he lifts it, the metal meniscus of the spoon shines uninterrupted silver. 

A wedge of ginger waits beneath the tea like a swimmer holding their breath. That makes two of them. So much tension in his shoulders and his spirit. That’s why he needs this. Release. With the teaspoon as a wand he stirs himself into a trance, following the wreath of flowers painted in eternal bloom beneath the teacup’s glaze.

Four times around the gilded rim marks a full breath in; another four a full breath out. He imagines all the upheaval of the recent years fitting in the tiny vortex of this teacup. There is no snowstorm blustering outside because there is no outside, only this toasty room, only the scent of sweetened tea.

He turns his attention to the tea cookies, arranged in a gently smiling crescent. Before he can take a single crumbly, buttery bite, a snow-bearing wind fights to claw its way inside. In its stead, Ashe enters, her body spread through the stages of shivering. She slips seamlessly into the shrinking radius of his peace.

Duscur has a word for the first snow that covers the grass completely — as Dedue notices the snowflakes fading from Ashe’s shoulders, it hovers half-formed over his tongue without alighting. He holds Ashe close and the word retreats into the continued silence of his throat. 

His lips cross the grain of her hair as he leaves a kiss on the crown of her head. At last a landing. The scents of dust and age linger like a passport stamp.

“How was Abyss? Anything of note today, or just more knight poetry?”

“Well— haha... that wasn’t a bad poem, okay?” Ashe smiles at the memory. What it was was epic-length erotica about a queen and a lady knight. By omission, she had distilled the raunchy parade of rhyming quatrains into _embarrassing_ and _immodest_.

She doesn’t know Dedue had already read it before she found it. Twice. Purely in the interest of expanding his reading proficiency, of course.

Ashe’s fingers push buttons and buckles until she frees herself from her coat in one azure flourish. For now, it gets set on the bedframe.

“If you say so.” Dedue accomplishes the spirit of a shrug by tilting his head to one shoulder. His eyes wander the one lip-deep divots, the soft shadows in her collarbones.

This is the season when their eyes linger on the rarity of open skin. So much of winter is spent hiding their bodies away, retreating beneath fabric like plants pruned to the root.

“Really! You wouldn’t like it. Court politics, who blushed at who. All sorts of meaningless fluff.” Ashe is right; the intrigue was tiresome to follow, but still her white lies turn her pink. It’s hard to miss the color as it unfurls down her cheeks. Dedue savors watching her fluster.

“Okay. Well, maybe we can practice meaningless fluff later.” Dedue’s deadpan packs the punch of a crest ability.

 _Sweet nothings_ is a phrase he’d learned reading hand-copied pulpy romances during his own visits to the Shadow Library. It lacks the literal bite of the Duscur word for lovers’ verbal nibbling at each other, a reciprocal nominalization of _chew_.

“ _Anyway_ , I found this,” Ashe says over the wildfire sizzling of her blush. She sets a thick volume on the table with an imposing thud. Ripples echo in the tea. “ _A Præcise Dictionnary of the Duscur Peeples Tounge_ , see?” 

She opens the clothbound cover. The spine gives a sclerotic groan. “Published at the University of Derdriu in... the Holy Kingdom? Oh my, no wonder the spelling was funny. It’s older than I thought.”

Dedue gives it a glance, his focus falling quickly to the byline. Not a Duscur name. He slides the teacup on its saucer towards himself. “I don’t trust this book.”

Ashe points to the due date in her willowy handwriting, alone at the top of the check-out card. “It had never been borrowed before. Ever. Which I thought was sad.”

“So it’s true here too. No one cared about Duscur before.” Dedue scowls at his reflection in the tea. The chunk of ginger makes a strangely pale nose. 

“Now wait, I don’t think that’s true. It says the author spent twenty years in Duscur working with—” Ashe leafs through the brittle pages with the lightest touch and tilts the tome to show columns of quill-written names squished like fishbones. “—all these people. You don’t do that if you don’t care.”

Dedue finds a name that interests him and jabs the old paper accusingly. “ _Molinaro_. Why did you help them? What could they have wanted? To tell the pitiable, unwashed masses of Duscur about the one goddess?”

“Well. Probably.” Ashe looks expectantly at the names, as if they could answer. “They certainly tried that several times over the centuries, didn’t they.”

“To our credit, it never worked.” Dedue scowls and nibbles on a cookie in round, grinding bites. His eyes make sidelong saccades toward the traitorous text.

Ashe folds her hands in her lap and stares at the spread pages, the uneven edges cut like skin parted around a fresh wound. “Really, this— isn’t the turn I expected this conversation to take.”

“Ashe. Your pity is not what this book needs. That’s something hotter, like a candle.”

“You’d _burn it_? It’s still knowledge of Duscur, imperfect as it is.” She clutches it close to her body. It rises with her breath as she falls backwards to the waiting cushions on the bed.

“What could it tell us that we don’t already know?” For an instant, even objecting, he wishes he could be the book. His skin tough and leathery, her hands soft over it— what he covets is being gripped and wanted even when his worth is in question. 

Ashe loosens her hold. “To be honest, I found it several weeks ago. I wondered about whether to bring it up, in both senses. I thought it could help _me_ understand. But I overlooked that you’re right here.”

“I see.” Dedue forces himself to soften, release the cage of tension binding his shoulders. It feels good to breathe with full lungs again. “When other people write about Duscur, they see reflected what they already wanted to see. My guess is this volume suffers from the same. Even if my people worked on it, who is doing the seeing?” He taps the byline again in answer.

“I was looking for something very specific. This is a dictionary after all. So, what if I said—” Ashe works her mouth into positions that feel strange, both more and less rehearsed than regular speech. Their meaning is looser and flows in sheets over the whole.

Dedue blinks and takes a sip of tea. Cooled and slightly over-steeped, but he will manage. He stirs to trick himself into calm. The ginger spins. “One more time? I was unready.”

Ashe turtles into her shoulders and repeats it as a curled whisper. 

“I really thought I was saying _I love you_. And Linhardt won’t like being told he was wrong about the pronunciation.”

“I heard it that time. You said it right, mostly.” Dedue pouts, nodding. His grip chokes the spoon and digs dashes into his palm. “It was good for someone not of Duscur.”

“But is it good for you?” Yearning shimmers in Ashe's green eyes as she pouts back.

Dedue looks at his gold-tinted reflection in the smooth surface of the tea. The ritual is over, interrupted, disrupted, failed. The storm is here despite his preparations. He will dash frantically into the eye. “Did the book teach you that?”

Ashe bobbles faithfully.

Dedue mirrors the nod. “Of course it did, unless you have another fiancé from Duscur I don’t know about. Maybe he should do a better job teaching you.”

He abandons his tea and the untouched cookies and sits down on the bed, where the consolation is that it’s easier to kiss Ashe on the forehead and rub their cheeks past each other.

Dedue repeats what she said, telling her he loves her. It feels truer to say it in the language he learned first. “Hear how I say it? Your issue is _qah_.”

“Kh—” Ashe warbles, fighting the urge to spit.

“No. _Qah_.” Dedue’s sound is clean and soft in his throat. 

“Ka...” Ashe’s tongue betrays her. “No, that’s not it either.”

“Reach back in your mouth, like you’re swallowing water.” He knows the word _uvula,_ but it doesn’t come to him. In Duscur the sound is called _round_ or _buried_ , like a seed in the loam.

“Kha—”

“Hm. You’re very good at that sound now.”

Ashe punches her pillow halfheartedly. “How will I tell you I love you if I can’t even make it through the first sound of the first word?”

Dedue turns the engagement ring on his left hand with gentle bewilderment bunching his brows. “On the positive side, your vowels are quite good.”

“There are only a handful of them, and I knew how to say them already.” She lies prone, frown-bent face subsiding into the pillow. The pops from her throat continue, warming the down with her breath.

Dedue sets a hand gently on her back and rubs idle circles. “Well, okay, how about this. Do you know what you’re really saying when you say you love someone in Duscur?”

Ashe interrupts the search for her uvula to shake her head and answer, “I just know the phrase.”

“Maybe the book has it. It means _my heart goes towards you_. And every time you try, I know it does.” Dedue draws her into a close embrace so he can mumble into her ear, “Also, I overheard you practicing your pronunciation with the cats.”

Ashe’s freckles disappear in a sea of red. She covers her face with palms pinky to pinky between her brows. “Oh my goddess.”

Dedue’s arms around her tighten, then he releases her and turns away. He can hide nothing while breathing against her back. When the rhythm of his exhales bunches, she isn’t surprised to reach behind herself and find the plane of his cheek slick with emotion.

“Oh? There, there.” She coos but doesn’t turn. Sometimes honesty is more forthcoming when unseen. “What’s this?”

Clumsily for lack of sight, Dedue matches their left hands, pairing the bands on their fourth fingers. “When you say it, I hear my family, their voices. I haven't spoken my language to anyone but the gods in years. And even then, rarely out loud.”

“Did I go too far? It never occurred to me that you might want to keep it that way. If it’s become so special and— private.”

He smiles through the curtain of sudden tears. “You have it perfectly wrong. You are my family now. A continuation of that old world. I never envisioned a life where I would speak it again, and here you are wanting to learn it. These are for all I couldn't say.” He wipes a dry dash across his cheekbones and gets slippery fingers.

“Dedue...” Ashe strokes his face like she would an open blossom.

He sets both feet on the hard floor and sits up, back arched. He folds his hands and breathes against his thumbs. “If we’re going to do this… whole Duscur-this, there is more you must know.” 

“Another story from Duscur?” Ashe leans closer. As much as Dedue had neglected the language, he just about leaked parables distilling folk wisdom. Why rice was washed just so, why to be kind to your siblings, millennia of the accrued mundane. She suspected they both enjoyed the retelling.

He shakes his head warily. “If only. This is a story from Faerghus.” He rubs his sternum, over the part where he has revisited the grief so many times it’s gone smooth. “I would have liked to make it through this war without constantly reliving the other, but that is not the life given to me.” Conflicts merge like beads of quicksilver: surrounding, toxic, shimmering.

In the midst of visions of mercury, Ashe curls up next to him, her cheek a blot of heat on his bicep. “What does that mean?” She doesn’t know where to put her hands, but her whole self pulls toward Dedue. Tension rises in her heartstrings. Care is a static cling.

Dedue crosses the small room and tugs a chest across the carpet, which bunches like a forehead in a frown. “It means I will tell you about this.”

From a hidden compartment he unfolds a lacy, long-sleeved gown. Reverence lives in the crispness of the motions.

The night-blue fabric is heavy with beads, each a fraction of the size of a grain of rice. They dazzle gold with the intensity of turmeric. From afar they resolve into animals that gallop, fly, and crawl across floating landscapes.

“It’s beautiful—” Ashe’s fingertips glide curiously above the designs. “Can I touch it?”

Dedue lifts it to her hands. “It shows the stars on the night I was born.” He lifts a portion near the lower hem. “This is the hunting trap, visible just before dawn. Here is the slow star that guides the shepherds.”

Ashe skims the midnight sky with her fingertips. She's no expert on cloth, but the texture intrigues her. “It seems so new.”

“It is.” Dedue clutches a fistful of the fabric and it stays bunched like a held breath long after he lets it go. “I had it made in secret. Right as it was finished, the war broke out.”

“All that work, there must be thousands of beads.” Ashe spreads her hands to take in the texture of row upon swirling row. “This isn’t something you make to keep hidden. Why was it secret?”

The corners of Dedue’s mouth bend down. “Because of a different one I will you about.”

*

The first harvest festival after the Tragedy, there are no trays of sweets, no frosted morsels topped with crushed nuts and powdered sugar. Dedue goes through the motions anyway, as if his homeland weren’t lying fallow. He buys flour and sugar, sticky-sweet fruits to boil, almonds to grind, as if he were going to bake. In truth, he can’t think about even measuring out the ingredients without nausea croaking in his throat. 

The first night that any other year would have brought dancing and holding the hands of people who no longer lived, he unfolds an off-white, bead-speckled gown he would have worn. It's one of the few salvageable things he owned before coming to the palace that wasn’t speckled or splattered with blood.

His hands look skeletal in the moonlight as he pulls the gown down his torso and past his knees. It fits snugly. He's grown several inches even in the past couple of months. Dimitri said it was better nutrition. Dedue’s pretty sure it’s mere puberty.

He covers his shoulders with a shawl and looks wistfully at the moon. A part of him has grown as distant and as sad. The Duscur verb for the tightening of the throat before crying is the same one for holding a hand or grasping a receding memory. He enacts all senses of the word.

By now he’s learned that white is the color of ghosts in Fódlan, that they don’t see the same creatures on the prowl after dark. As he smooths the fabric over his stomach, he wonders whether the sundown demons said to eat entrails of men in white don’t also live in Faerghus. If he tries hard enough, maybe he can forget to see them too.

The moonlight casts the beads as scattered salt, the cloth like snowfall. Wrapped in it, he is an intact fragment of Duscur. Fódlan is a strange land and a mold he must press himself against to survive, the new soil for his roots. Maybe he will simply shatter. Maybe he will melt. He hasn’t forgotten about the demons. He closes the curtains just in case. 

Tossing and turning with a hand to his chest, he shakes to his own heartbeat. He misses the moon and her gentle light on his face as he sleeps. He opens the window again. Pale men with swords and spears have haunted him more than any demon. If Duscur’s demons are here too, may they aid his swift return.

He prays. In return for coming to his senses, the god of night grants him sleep. 

He wakes to sunlight and the feeling of being emptied.

“Dimitri!” Dedue blinks the blond boy into focus and wipes the crust from his eyes.

“You’re late for our lesson, so I thought I would bring it to you.” He sets a silver tray bearing an inkwell, sheets of parchment, and twin quills on the desk. They had been copying pages from a book of strange religious tales Dimitri said was a secret from even the Central Church. Only in memory does Dedue consider that the sense of intrigue may have been to make the repetitive loops and strokes of writing less dull.

Dedue rises gracelessly from bed, body woozy with remnants of slumber. Bits of morning scatter off the beads, bringing both of them to squint.

He checks it for wrinkles, runs his hands over his sheets to check for beads that had come loose in the night. 

Dimitri stares in silence, unsure what to make of this. His first, unguarded reaction is a look of revulsion that flays Dedue's heart. He covers it with the diplomatic tone he’s perfected since the Tragedy. His voice follows an uncomfortable flatness like soil over a grave. “Dedue, why are you wearing a dress?”

It didn’t make a good sleeping garment, so Dedue bends his arms to take it off. “I wanted to. Why not?”

“Saving the image of Duscur in the eyes of the Kingdom requires _us_ to keep up a certain image, and I don't know that it includes this...” His voice trails off into a space filled by the sway he knows he has over Dedue.

“This is the celebratory clothing of my people. We wear on it the days the gods are closest.” _And when they feel farthest away_ , he adds in his thoughts.

“Unless you want to meet them sooner than you should, it might be best if you don’t wear it. I worry for your safety,” Dimitri counters. 

The room is empty save the two of them. No one is in earshot this early in the morning. 

They rarely discuss the tragedy, preferring to let the negative spaces it left in them make themselves known with silence. For Dimitri to wield the dead—Duscur’s dead—as a rhetorical trick is unacceptable. It doesn’t surprise Dedue when the thunder he hears in the air is his own voice.

Dedue splits his knifepoint stare between their half-done writing and a point between Dimitri’s eyes. “These old stories of Fódlan depict cross-dressing, women coming from pieces of men, people springing implausibly from one another, but they will look unkindly on a _garment_ from Duscur.” 

Dimitri matches his intensity. “They will look unkindly on a body from Duscur doing things they don’t understand.”

Dedue’s bones shake, his blood boiling. He swallows. “A body? Am I another corpse to them already?”

“For you to be safe, ordinary subjects of the crown must see a man, like them, but brown.” Dimitri steps towards him, raising his hand to placate what he has incited.

Dedue steps back. The yard between them widens to a chasm. “And what of what I want?”

“The narrative is written by the victors and it’s not you, it’s not even me. I really am worried for your safety. First and foremost is survival.” Dimitri’s fist meant for emphasis hits the table and cracks it down the middle in a spray of splinters. The ink spills on their essays and puddles into a thick, ichorous stain that sprawls in the grooves of the floor like a fingerprint.

Dedue’s pulse jumps to his skin. First he checks for specks on his gown. To his relief, none. He asks with a big voice, though he feels small, “Do you threaten me, your highness?”

“That was an accident. Dedue, you know I— lose control of my crest sometimes.”

Speaking tastes bitter and has the texture of chewing sand. “I will give myself up because I know what you say is true.” His lungs squeeze like fists. Already he understands it will become a daily choice to pierce his heart with a blade. He envisions its slow turning between his ribs.

*

“And then what happened?” Ashe coils like a flower at night, innards guarded against the stars.

“First, I wished my cheeks could be stone, but they weren’t, so I cried. Then I changed right there, my clothes and my heart. I let my dress fall as if I didn't care about it. I thought I wanted to burn it. I looked at it with his revulsion. It was pathetic. In that moment...” Dedue remembers the double nakedness, the morning air against his sleep-hot skin. His breaths shallow as time knots itself, the careful line between recalling and reliving thinned into oblivion.

“No... no! Enough!” Ashe cups Dedue’s knees to anchor him to herself, herself to the earth, a lightning rod for his pains. “You don’t have to tell me. You don’t have to tell me anything.”

Dedue slides his palms beneath Ashe’s hands and traces the lifelines from beneath. At the end he taps the ring on her finger. “You said you would be here for all of me. I'm telling my story on my terms. It’s... refreshing. For someone else to hear it.”

“Okay. Go on.” Ashe plants a tickling kiss along his jaw.

“After it happened, I was so confused. It was hard to believe that Faerghus would be so threatened by a child from Duscur in a dress... it was a strange kind of power—no, _sway_ , that I’d never held over anyone. That no one had ever held over me. I realized then that what Dimitri wanted from me was to rehabilitate the _idea_ of Duscur in a way that was acceptable to Faerghus.”

Ashe sets her hand over Dedue’s. “I remember my first dress. What I felt wasn’t power. It was fear. I was afraid. I thought that people watching me—they were always nameless, faceless— were afraid too. Of me.”

“Then you know what fear makes us do. At the time, I was, you say, of two minds? Fódlan speech’s grasps at emotion feels false. I was of two hearts. My Fódlan heart, my understanding of what it meant to live after the Tragedy, was resolute.” Dedue’s eyes shine and smart. “But my Duscur heart hardened that day, and the gods hardened to me.”

“Did you burn your clothes like you wanted to? If it was anything like this one... this would be even more irreplaceable now.”

Dedue goes to the chest once more. Setting his fingers on the latch, he peers inside at the contents of his life contorted into a single box he can lift. What in it hasn’t been altered by his uprooting? Only his armor lives separately, and from that too is a line back to the Kingdom. _Changed_ is not a value statement. _Different_ is not a synonym for _defective_. Declaring is not believing.

Dedue drapes the off-white dress over Ashe’s arms. He watches her curiosity, pleased as her eyes wander over beads tracing veins of leaves, the moon and the sun. Unlike the blue one, this garment is well-worn, soft against her hands as the fibers yield to gravity.

“After what I did in it, I don't think the gods would want it. I wouldn't be surprised if it refused to burn.”

“It’s so small,” Ashe says about the dress that looks like it would fit her. “For you anyway.” Envisioning Dedue as anything but a head taller than her stokes a strange dissonance.

He watches her fingers trace soothing swirls along the beads. A trickle of joy wends through the solid of his heart, that what brought him so much grief can be recognized for its beauty, as it was meant to be. Its early history could be sealed off in an oxbow of bad memory. “You could try it on.”

“Are you sure? This is—” she inhales surprise. “Wow, is it okay for me to do this?”

“It might be big for you, but it can be altered.” Dedue holds it up to Ashe’s shoulders to see if it would fit. 

“But it’s _yours_.” Her fingers guard the inches of air nearest her body.

“Consider. The color is like a Fódlan wedding dress. You said it would be irreplaceable. As are you, so I would be honored to have you wear it. It does me no good sitting in dust. This way, it’s used, and you become part of Duscur’s story.”

“Okay, okay.” She pecks him on the cheek and watches his stern demeanor thaw swiftly into spring. With one wrist she wipes her face of tears that haven’t yet dewed. “I thought you were just going to persuade me with thrift, but now I think I’m going to cry.”

Dedue preemptively offers the napkin folded beneath the cookie plate.

“Would you wear it, then?” He daubs at the corners of her eyes, but water beads in his own. “I wasn’t sure you would want a hand-me-down.”

“You forget,” Ashe sniffles, still fending off the moisture gathering along her bottom lashes, “if we were nobles, we’d call it an _heirloom_.” 

“Let’s make sure it fits before we call it anything like that.”

It slides over her easily. When Dedue pulls the laces as tight as they go, bringing the old fabric of Duscur to her, she fits comfortably. Dedue notes the pale triangle of skin between her shoulder blades, freckled where the gaps in the dress’s pattern call for beads. “Well?”

“Well, I can always pad this part,” she muses about the ample room around her chest.

She moves her hips so the ends of the dress sway off the floor in a breeze of her own making.

Dedue strips to his underclothes. Despite the cold in the room, his skin is hot with a radiant pride in his near-nakedness. 

He raises his arms and looks upward into the garment he will fill. After a moment inside its shadow, he emerges from the eclipse a changed man. 

He never felt he was less Duscur; that’s something infused beyond bone, deep into the starstuff of his being. This is a kind of molting, shedding what he once contorted to fit but that he has now outgrown. The magma of bygone shame has cooled to something that can be handled with bare hands. Glassy and sharp, painful but nameable.

Ashe draws and ties the strings and at last Dedue can breathe. His body is adorned as it should be. He shines.

She giggles.

“What is it?” Dedue emerges from a near-trance to look for splotches of stain or loose threads.

“You carry yourself differently while wearing this. Just looking at you, I know this is what you’re supposed to be wearing.”

Dedue’s hand finds its way over his heart, where a better, pleasant hurt has taken hold.

Ashe brings their hips together. The beads clack and crackle softly where they touch. “Is this what we’ll look like?”

“There is one more thing. I would not have this.” He pulls the pin from his hair and his body floods with the weightlessness of relief. Snowy strands cascade over his face.

Ashe whispers, awestruck, “I’ve never seen you put your hair down unless you were going to sleep.”

Dedue folds his hands between his knees and for once looks small. The beaded rabbits on his shoulder blades get closer to touching noses. “That was also an idea from his highness.” He gathers the frizzing ends at his chin and spins them between his fingers. “At first I kept it like that because...”

Ashe sets a hand on the distant side of his face and guides him to look at her. Their eyes meet, but Dedue is distant. “Because what?”

He sets the clip on the table next to the room-temperature tea. “I’m doing a lot of talking. Are you tired of my voice yet?”

Ashe takes the hairpin off the table and runs a fingertip over the engraved flowers, five and seven petals. She’s seen ones like it in the windows of shops in Fhirdiad’s merchant districts. It isn’t a Duscur design.

“I could fall asleep to you talking,” she lilts dreamily before widening her expression to alertness. “Not that I will! I’m paying attention, promise!”

Dedue smiles with tired eyes. His face is softer with the new framing of his hair. His eyes have always been soft when they look at Ashe. “Okay. You might laugh at why.”

“No.”

“Well, I will,” he rattles bitterly. “I thought the gods wouldn’t recognize me with a Faerghus hairstyle. That was fine, because how could I face them awake after we abandoned each other? The cycle fed itself. Without the gods I had no one to speak to, and without speaking, I was cut off from the gods. Even when I started praying again, it felt more natural to leave it up.”

“Wait a minute, the king told you to put your hair up _and_ not speak Duscur?”

Nostrils flared and stance lowered, Ashe looks ready to fight. A dress is the wrong outfit for that sort of combat, but Dedue notes the change. Never would he have imagined her even hypothetically heading to blows with authority of her own accord, much less the reigning monarch. Dedue basks in the significance as he opens her balled fists one finger at a time, as the sun helps a flower bud bloom. 

“When he was prince— not with those words, but they were outgrowths of his requests for me to be open to him. He was insistent. I felt I owed him that. Once, I stubbed my toe on my bed and screamed at the gods in Duscur—as a reflex—and he said, _Why do you hide behind another language? Don’t you trust me? We can be honest with each other_.”

“This whole thing— what? You said that he was kind to you. He said you gave him cause to live. Is this what that kindness looks like? It sounds suffocating and invasive.”

Dedue lapses into memory for another moment. A cold shiver trickles down his spine. “How does one refuse a prince? I resist him in my small ways. You have heard it from him, many times. He has other words for it. He laments that I longer call him Dimitri.”

“I see! You hold him at a distance with formality. But does he know that _this_ is why? When you say it’s just because it’s proper—”

“As long as I can hold myself apart from him enough to breathe, it doesn’t matter what reason I give him.”

“What if he could understand?”

“He has done his damage. After he helps us return to our lands, his role in rebuilding is to stand aside.” A sharp, scoffing breath steams through his nose. He collects himself and dons a veneer of calm. “His highness is incapable of envisioning Duscur as anything but an idea. After all, he never knew it. Does a fish imagine air until a bird plucks it from the water?”

Ashe nods, the mortal implications for the fish weighing on her. Which is Dimitri?

Dedue holds up a finger to pause the conversation and slots a cookie into his mouth. He leans to the side to avoid crumbs falling on the precious fabric or being ground in among the beadwork. The sugar doesn’t help like he thought it would. He swallows.

Crumbs come anyway, bouncing deviously between bites. He stands to wipe them off.

“He has no way of knowing what we would really want. And after so long disbelieving, I don’t know if I can see it anymore either. But if this is how the people of Duscur are to survive, then so be it.”

Ashe stands too. “What you understood from him was that you couldn’t _be_ Duscur. As if it could wash off in a river.”

“Not just me, all of the survivors. We were ready to rid ourselves of everything we could. Even now when we gather, we use Fódlan speech to avoid any more suspicion. Yet all we have hidden in the end is ourselves.” He looks at his hair as he parts it into streams with his fingers. “To ask for forgiveness, I burned herbs. So many herbs, even the weeds we picked. Nothing made up. And for that, I think I am ready to face the gods.”

“And I’ll come with you. Okay?”

A twinkle in his eye like sunlight on submerged sea ice belies an idea zooming across synapses. “Yes! Come with me.” Dedue reaches, hand outstretched. 

“I meant metaphorically. You mean a real place? Now?” 

Dedue doesn’t hear the wind outside over his own excited heartbeat. “Just right here. My arms. Will you dance?”

“Well? Hm. I sure can try!” Laughter flows out her sheepish smile like the rustling of a pile of leaves. She holds out her hands in kind. “Better if you lead me.”

“There’s a dance from Duscur. It's like the dance they taught us for the White Heron Cup, but with the third beat dragged out. Everyone does it together—”

They sway back and forth in a box step, a wobbling isomer in the little universe of the room. In Dedue’s memory, the festival crowd takes a warm plural, the same for a gathering of people; natural groups like petals on a flower, cloves of garlic in a bulb.

“ _This_ will be how Duscur begins.” 

The Duscur metaphor for the heightened feelings of early love features walking into cold, scooping up snow with bare hands and hurting pleasantly as it melted. In the embrace that looks like Dedue is comforting Ashe, she is not surrounding herself with him but warming his core. 

“And this dance, can you guess what it’s called?”

“Well.” Ashe thinks as her legs carry her through the steps. She twirls once, sloshing enough blood around her brain to get the joke. “I bet it has a _qah_ in it.”

Dedue remembers the words for all sorts of snows. He clasps them in his heart and Ashe in his arms.

“That’s it!” He kisses her simply. “The way you said it was perfect.”

Dedue’s first reaction to Ashe’s proposal had been _are you sure_? Now he is sure, of himself, in himself, his heart covered thoroughly in a bliss like that first snow.


End file.
